Vignette: Gooseberry, Cuff, and Blake find Godfrey
Ablewhite dead — uncaptioned vignette for the "The Story. Second Period."
— forty-second illustration in the Doubleday (New York) 1946 edition of The Moonstone, p. 421. 6.5 x 10.5 cm. [Having followed the Indian
sailor rather Mr. Luker, Gooseberry has tracked the man with the package (presumably
containing the Moonstone) to the somewhat disreputable area of Tower Wharf, to a
public-house named "The Wheel of Fortune" in Lower Thames Street. Sergeant Cuff fetches
Franklin Blake and with Gooseberry in tow arrives just in time to observe the landlord
have the local carpenter force the door as the man inside has not responded. However,
they are too late: the Indians have entered the garret from a skylight, and have
smothered the disguised Godfrey Ablewhite.] Scanned image and text by
Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image
without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1)
credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL.]

Passage Illustrated

At the moment when I crossed the threshold of the door, I heard Sergeant
Cuff's voice, asking where I was. He met me, as I returned into the room, and forced me
to go back with him to the bedside.

"Mr. Blake!" he said. "Look at the man's face. It is a face disguised
— and here’s a proof of it!"

He traced with his finger a thin line of livid white, running backward from
the dead man’s forehead, between the swarthy complexion, and the slightly-disturbed black
hair. “Let’s see what is under this,” said the Sergeant, suddenly seizing the black hair,
with a firm grip of his hand.

My nerves were not strong enough to bear it. I turned away again from the
bed.

The first sight that met my eyes, at the other end of the room, was the
irrepressible Gooseberry, perched on a chair, and looking with breathless interest, over
the heads of his elders, at the Sergeant's proceedings.

"He's pulling off his wig!" whispered Gooseberry, compassionating my
position, as the only person in the room who could see nothing.

There was a pause — and then a cry of astonishment among the people
round the bed.

"He's pulled off his beard!" cried Gooseberry.

There was another pause — Sergeant Cuff asked for something. The
landlord went to the wash-hand-stand, and returned to the bed with a basin of water and a
towel.

Gooseberry danced with excitement on the chair. "Come up here, along with
me, sir! He's washing off his complexion now!"

The Sergeant suddenly burst his way through the people about him, and came,
with horror in his face, straight to the place where I was standing.

"Come back to the bed, sir!" he began. He looked at me closer, and checked
himself "No!" he resumed. "Open the sealed letter first — the letter I gave you
this morning."

I opened the letter.

"Read the name, Mr. Blake, that I have written inside."

I read the name that he had written. It was — Godfrey
Ablewhite.

"Now," said the Sergeant, "come with me, and look at the man on the
bed."

Commentary

The tall, dark-skinned sailor who has abandoned his nationality and social
status to void detection is none other than the arch-hypocrite Godfrey Ablewhite, thought
to be on the Continent. He has been clever enough to avoid detection by Mr. Bruff's men,
but Gooseberry had seen the package passed from Luker to the sailor in the bank, and had
quickly pursued the tall, East Indian sailor to a public house on Lower Thames Street,
where he rented a garret room for the night. His mistake was underestimating the powers
of detection and the resourcefulness of the "jugglers," the three Brahmins entrusted with
the sacred mission of regaining custody of the Moonstone and returning it to the Temple
of the Hindu Moon God at Somnath in India. Western greed has at last been defeated by
eastern patience and religious dedication.

Since the solution of the mystery and the unmasking (literally in this case) of the
criminal are the climax and dénouement of the crime-and-detection novel, the
illustrator has been careful to focus on the reactions of the landlord (right, identified
by his keys), the poker-faced Sergeant Cuff (centre, now holding a countryman's
full-brimmed hat and walking-stick, and wearing a shooting jacket), and the bemused
Franklin Blake (left), with the goggle-eyed Gooseberry, between the two, staring at the
dead man. All we can see of the murder victim, however, is his clenched hands, perhaps
suggestive of his determination to retain the Moonstone until he can have it cut up into
multiple gems in Antwerp. The reader cannot judge the identity of the murdered man merely
from studying the picture. The Harper's illustrator took a
different approach, foregrounding Cuff as a kind of presenter, and depicting Godfrey so
effectively disguised that the reader cannot guess the victim's identity from his
appearance. With his stiff, wiry beard (a very good forgery, like Ablewhite himself) the
dead man in no way resembles the suave confidence man of previous illustrations. William
Jewett's handling of his materials is masterful as he associates the death of the
hypocrite and thief with the working class stratum of society who fill the spartan room
with its cracked plaster and peeling paint. Sharp merely sketches in the skylight above
Gooseberry and suggests a few others in the room: the barmaid (peeping around the portly
publican (right), a man without a hat (perhaps the carpenter) and four men with hats.

The relevant wood-engraving from the 1868 Edition: The upper room at The Wheel of
Fortune.

Above: The highly effective climactic wood-engraving in the original
serial in Harper's of the moment just before "The Discovery
of the Truth," "Look at the man's face. It is a face disguised
— and here's proof of it!" (1 August 1868). [Click on the image to enlarge
it.]